In the spirit of Halloween, here’s a flashback to certainly one of the creepiest stories I’ve ever worked on: The Ancient Art of Exorcism. More recently, there’s this ghost story.
- Here’s LeRoy Standish’s version of the ghost hunting story in Sunday’s Daily Press.
- Carve online pumpkins. (Source.)
- Not at all Halloweeny, but frightening in a different way: a database of everyone’s driver’s licenses from around the country. Yes, yours is in there, too.
- I almost hesitate to pass along these sorts of polls, but here you go. Adults only, please. (Note the page is not safe for work and you’ll probably want to use a Hotmail or GMail address or something to avoid potential future spam.) (Source.)
- And for treats of an adult nature, check out Tiki Bar TV. (This time, it’s probably work safe, depending on what sort of sense of humor your boss has.) It’s also available as a podcast — hello, Video iPod! — but you can simply watch the Quicktime files on their site. If giggly drunken girls, lounge music and hammy acting are wrong, I don’t wanna be right.
Blizzard Entertainment’s Eric Dodd and Scott Mercer discussed two topics near and dear to the hearts of World of Warcraft players — professions and items in general — in a panel Saturday at BlizzCon in Anaheim.
Blizzard won’t be adding item quality to crafting, exactly, on the theory that no one wants a subpar version of an item, and one of their goals is that every crafter should theoretically want to use their item, when at the appropriate level. Instead, they will be adding more recipes with random properties; the items will still all be worth using by someone of the appropriate level, but there will still be an incentive to make multiple versions of an item, to get the “perfect” item.
The 1.9 patch later this year will upgrade fishing dramatically, adding resource nodes for fishing — specifically, schools of certain types of fish and shipwrecks. Players will still be able to fish anywhere, but a fisherman could have a better idea that they would be catching winter squid or a deviate fish if they found a school of them before casting their line. The weekly Stranglethorn fishing contest features these sorts of nodes of spotted tastyfish for the duration of the event and served as a test of the concept.
Enchanters will also be getting an upgrade to their profession in the patch, with the addition of enchating oils and nexus crystals. The oils will produce short-term powerful enchantments and will provide enchanters with an item they can sell in the auction house. (Not having most enchanters’ goods saleable in that way is actually part of the design of the profession, as the developers want players to have a distinctly different experience each time a new character develops with a different profession.) The example shown was Wizard Oil, which adds +24 spell damage to a weapon for 30 minutes. Five doses of Wizard Oil require three illusion dusts and two firebloom herbs.
Nexus crystals will be a new high level component disenchanted from high-end epic raid gear. It was felt that disenchanting extremely nice raid gear and just getting a large brilliant shard wasn’t special enough and was a big let-down compared to someone being able to use the epic loot. New extremely powerful enchantments will require nexus crystals as a component.
The enchanting interface will also be overhauled in either the 1.9 or 1.10 patch.
Cooking will also receive some tweaks in the 1.9 patch, but a substantial overhaul and improvement of the secondary skill is not in the immediate future.
Specializations for tailoring and alchemy will be available next year, probably in the Burning Crusade expansion. Although the specializations are not yet finalized, alchemy at this point is set to get elixer, potion and transmutation specializations.
The new expansion will also add the jewelcrafting profession, which will allow players to make magical rings and necklaces, crowns and jewelcrafter-only trinkets, as well as socketable items and gems that fit into sockets to allow players to customize items, similar to how Diablo II items can be improved or how augments work in EverQuest I.
Sockets do not compete with enchantments, though — although not every item will have a socket, mostly items in the Burning Crusade expansion — it will be an extra “slot” along with the current temporary enchantment and permanent enchantments every weapon and many items can have applied to them.
The bottomless bag recipe — which Mercer stressed is a “world drop” that can drop from nearly any high level NPC, and not just Baron Rivendare in Stratholme — is not likely to become much more common, but at some point, more large bags will be entering the game, including some bigger than the current 18 slot limit.
Mercer and Dodd also gave some hints about the two new Ahn’Qiraj dungeons in Silithus, which will be added in the 1.9 patch: Zul’Gurub style armor quests, with multiple drops being useful for multiple classes, will be present for both zones and there will be upgrades to existing spells available in one or both of the dungeons.
Although there were no announcements of new single-group dungeons, other than references to those in the forthcoming Burning Crusade expansion, Blizzard Entertainment’s Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan and Corey Stockton talked about the art and science of making a World of Warcraft dungeon Saturday at BlizzCon in Anaheim.
In the course of developing dungeons during alpha and beta for the game, the team came to regard the Scarlet Monastery as an early pinnacle of the craft, notably for its modular “winged” structure. But the realization that this worked so well came too late in the process for the next wave of dungeons, and adding back doors and/or quested keys to allow access to later portions of Uldaman, Gnomeregan and Stratholme failed to produce a similar wing-style experience. But later dungeons, such as Maraudon and Dire Maul were designed that way from the ground up, as will many of the dungeons added in the Burning Crusade expansion: Tempest Keep, the fortress of Prince Kael’thas of the Blood Elves, will be divided into the Factory, Arcane Prison and Atrium wings, for instance. (Names and design details subject to change between now and release, of course.)
Although Hakkar’s plague spreading uncontrollably across servers is the most famous example of dungeon design going awry due to a skipped line of code, another boss in the troll city of Zul’Gurub also was a menace early on: The Bloodlord, who levels up every time he kills a player character, hit Tigole’s character for a 12,000 point Mortal Strike during in-house testing. It turns out the designers had forgotten to limit how many times the Bloodlord could level up, and he was level 74 by the time he wiped out the Blizzard testers entirely.
Zul’Gurub, with its modular approach — which shares the ability for groups to choose what content to deal with, similar to what wings provide — is a template for future dungeons. Look for less linear dungeons with lower raid caps: Zul’Gurub has a cap of 20 players, Medivh’s tower of Kharazan is likely to have a cap of 10 people in its raid wing.
“At a certain place, adding more people to a raid doesn’t make it more fun,” Kaplan said, “It just devalues the contributions of the people there.”
The new Horde race for the World of Warcraft game, blood elves, will become available in next year’s expansion, and it was previewed by Blizzard Entertainment at BlizzCon in Anaheim this weekend.
A guildmate of mine pointed out that waiting in the 90 minute line to play the Burning Crusade expansion wasn’t necessary, since we could wait for two minutes at the Nvidia booth to play it there. So we did.
Pregenerated blood elves — mage, warlock, warrior and priest — were set up on all the demo machines at BlizzCon, and we each gave Blood Elves a whirl. Only one quest was initially available on Sunstrider Isle, although I suspect people before us did most of the level 1 quests. The one quest available was to kill mana worms — think tiny versions of the flying dragon snake thing in “The Never Ending Story.” But running around the island, we got to see hostile miniature treants, a banished blood elf warlock (hostile) and some small great cats, also hostile.
The blood elves are definitely not simply repaints of the existing night elf models. Their features are more rounded, their ears stick straight up, and their bodies are less muscular. All of their newbie gear has a more stylized look, including kukri-inspired daggers and swords, and newbie robes with gold ornamentation. They jump in sort of a flying martial arts pose and instead of sometimes flipping, they sometimes spin instead. Their dance is a 1950s style shimmy of the hips combined with rubbing a toe on the ground — I think that might be called the Mashed Potato, I’m not sure. It was too loud to hear any vocal emotes, if they’ve even been added at this point.
Their innate mana-draining ability is pretty impressive against level 1 and level 2 foes, but only the silence ability — which has a significant cooldown period — is likely to be useful past level 20 or so.
Sunstrider Isle looks sort of like I’d imagined: Take night elf art and architecture, rip out all the nature-based motifs, and replace them with a strong reliance on magic. Objects like bookshelves float or even rotate in the air. There are small translocation gates used to get around between floating platforms. Pet Siamese cats are everywhere. Life for survivors of the Scourge attacks on Quel’Thalas looks to be quite comfortable, even if they’re effectively just living in a small gilded cage.
The one quest text I was able to read specifically mentioned the destiny of the blood elves is on Outland.
Having seen the new race creation process through the alpha period, from this brief glimpse — only one quest, and I wasn’t able to get to the zoneline for the next zone, if it was even open, with a level 1 blood elf dodging angry treants — the polish and quality looks comparable.
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Jenn took a ton of pictures at BlizzCon:
Despite the creativity and work that went into these costumes — the murloc activist had a hilarious moment at one of the panels, when he railed at the developers for giving away a free in-game murloc pet to BlizzCon attendees — there were probably fewer than 50 folks in costume out of the thousands in the Anaheim Convention Center.
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